We had a lovely Thanksgiving. I hosted this year and even made my first turkey. Thanks for the recipe Martha!! It was delicious and I guess with all that butter and wine, how could it go wrong?

We had a huge temperature drop on Thanksgiving day and even saw our first snow of the season. Julen celebrated by creating this "winter garden" on his nature table...so sweet. He appropriately traded out white wool for the orange on the trees we made at the preschool.

Thanks to Abbie and Ellie for hosting the kids ATC swap. It was quite a success! We did it once before, but Julen was not old enough to partcipate...this year he was and he was thrilled!!

Julen made wet-on-wet watercolors with salt for his partners-he was grouped with six other four-year-olds.

We spent five glorious days at our friend's farm last week. Everything moves at a slower pace there and I just love it. There is time for long dinners, mile-long walks and time to share coffee and conversation with friends, face to face instead of facebook to facebook. The weather was perfect for apple picking, tree climbing and exploring all the fall flowers crops. (I went a little wild taking photos which can be found here.)

My friend's farm is know as "probably the largest bittersweet farm in the world". I love that. "Probably". He doesn't know for sure, but he certainly has a lot of it. How I do love bittersweet, the perfect fall flower.

It was quite an adventure for the boys. They wanted to be outside the entire day.

For each card I have a little pumpkin that can hide in the tree stump (when it gets scared). Each pumpkin has a happy face on one side and a frightening face on the other. Although my son thinks it's more of an angry face. It's been a while since I made ATCs and I forgot how much I really enjoy working on such a small scale. I think I may have to do more of these soon.

I've been making artist trading cards for a few years now, and every time I've been in a swap, Peanut has been right by my side, watching, helping and just so curious about what I was doing. When Blair and Erin planned this swap for kids, I signed him up immediately. I'm not sure how they were able to do it, but they grouped the kids by age. Peanut is in a group of six kids, all of whom are four-and-a-half years old. He couldn't wait to get started. Right away he knew he wanted to do watercolor.

This is a traditional style of watercolor painting that is used in many Waldorf schools. Most of you are probably already familiar with this method, but for those who aren't, it's a simple and beautiful way of bringing color alive.

Here's the method we used:

Using good quality watercolor paper, you begin by soaking the paper in a sink or bowl full of water. Once the paper has absorbed some water (after approximately fifteen minutes), lift it out and gently run your fingers or a sponge on both sides to remove excess water. At this point I folded the paper to the correct ATC size (2.5" x 3.5") and gently tore them apart. By tearing the paper you get a softer edge and when it is painted, it soaks up more of the pigment making it create a naturally darker border. Next, Peanut got out his watercolors and began mixing colors. This is his favorite part, he loves to experiment with color. The beauty of using such thick paper is that he is able to "erase" something he isn't happy with by clearing the paint off with water. The last step, and my favorite part (because it is so magical), is once you are satisfied with the color and before the paint dries, take a salt shaker and shake salt over portions of the painting. As it dries the salt crystals gradually suck up the pigment leaving star-like patterns on the paper.

It's more visible on a bigger painting like this one.

More variations.

Once Peanut finished the cards we decided to use the styrofoam stamping technique to stamp his name to the back of each card so he only had to write his name once.

Peanut is now eagerly waiting for the mailman after preschool each day.

Thanks for all the well wishes from my last post. Still no changes in my health, so am just hanging in there. I got home late Wednesday after an unexpected stay over in Atlanta due to bad weather and cancelled flights. It was straight to the doctor to find out what I have is bronchitis. It's either wait it out or take steroids. I'm just going to try and let it run it's course. Thought I'd give this recipe for good health a try. If anyone knows of any others I'd love to hear about them.

In swapping news, even though I'm months behind in my paperbag swag round robin, I dared to sign up for Amy's annual Haunted ATC Swap. I played around with several witch designs, but they never quite looked right when I pieced them out in felt. So, in a bit of a deadline panic I went for a similar design I created out of paper last year for a postcard swap. Guess I'm still quite stuck creatively.

They were a little trickier to work out of felt, but so much fun to embellish. I do realize this is more "Day of the Dead" than Halloween, but I'm sticking with it.

I also couldn't resist Michelle's embroidered button swap. That was something new for me and so much fun. Here's a bad photo of the ones I made. (dark days make for tricky photo taking)

...and here are all the lovely ones that arrived in today's mail.

Mine are from Amy, Anina, Joy, Monica, Regina and one from the lovely swap hostess herself. Thank YOU Michelle! You can see more here. She may host another in the near future so if you're interested, be on the look out.

I first saw a mood board at Veronica's site and had visions of organizing myself in this way. It still hasn't happened. I have the tendancy to tear out pages from magazines of images that grab my attention and inspire me. They end up in a huge binder and every once in a while I get the urge to browse through them. Many of them come from House and Garden magazine. I love this publication for the beautiful photographs, cheap subscription price and the wonderful monthly letter from the editor, Dominique Browning. There used to be a regular section called Fabric Obsession, which featured a wide variety of gorgeous textiles every month. It seems to have disappeared from the publication which I'm really bummed about. Anyway, I selected a few of these pages from my binder that were inspiring me at the moment.

The colors of these textiles were the first thing to catch my eye. Using felt and embroidery floss, I made these ATCs.

This one I made for Raya for Vallen's ATC swap she hosted last month. I got a little carried away with chain stitch filling in all the space to make this flower. There must be a name for this type of stitching, but I have no idea what it is. I stretched the felt out quite a bit so stuffed the petals of the flowers a little and was really happy with the result.

Maybe one day I'll get the hang of a mood board, but for now I'll just have to sort through the piles of pages looking for inspiration.

I was peeking around at Flickr over the weekend looking for ideas and patterns of something I could stitch. I wanted to make some ATC's just to play with working different designs. There are so many wonderful images there it was hard to find a starting point. I ended up in the vintage mug pool. The images on some of these mugs are so inspiring...I settled on four, although I see many more possibilities in there. Since it's Mosiac Monday, here they are in a mosiac.

in the form of these wonderful little 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch ATCs is one of my favorite things to do. And I have recently received some beauties I want to share. First is the Second Annual Valentine ATC Swap (with goodies) hosted by the very talented Amy.

Such a lovely collection from Deborah, Meg, Rose, Mary and Sarah. Lots of beautiful stitchwork and collage in these ATCs. I love all of them! And am so grateful to Amy for finding the time to host yet another amazing swap. The card in the middle came from her, filled with lovely surprises as is her tradition.

Another Valentine ATC surprise came from my dear friend Julie, who I met through this swap. She doesn't have a blog, but often shares photos of her projects. She is so talented and creates such beautiful things out of paper, I really think she ought to start her own blog so more people could see her amazing work. Julie sent me one of her beautiful pieces, this is so sweet...thanks so much Julie!

When I saw one of Tina's ATCs on the Wednesday Stamper site, I commented on it and we arranged a trade. She sent me one last December, then the other as a Happy New Year greeting. Her collage work is so lovely and inspiring. She even creates artfully designed envelopes to send these in which is so exciting to see among the other mail.

This next wonderful trio came from the very thoughtful, spiritual and always generous Teresa who last year challenged herself to make three ATCs for 25 of her blog friends. A huge endeavor that I believe she has come close to finishing. Teresa and I had met a few occasions on swaps, so we were familiar with one another, but I was so impressed she took the time to learn more about me so she was able to carefully select three words that came to mind when she thought of me. She knows I travel a lot for my work and here is what she came up with. These mean so much to me.

There's more! I've become a HUGE fan of some artists I've met at Flickr. When someone posts an ATC that is "up for trade" I'm always eager to swap. This is how I got these two original artwork pieces from Annette in Norway. I love everything that Carambatack creates. She posts new ATCs daily and it's so hard to resist wanting to trade for ALL of them. These are both so beautiful.

This next one is from Emmy in Holland. I LOVE all of Cramzy's textile work...I could browse through her Flickr photos for hours feeling so inspired. This piece is so gorgeous with all it's color and texture and you'll just have to believe me because this photo does not do justice to her amazing work.

Another textile artist I just can't get enough of is the amazingly talented Ruth Rae. I first found her at flickr and have now become a huge fan of her blog as well. She turns paper and fabric and lace and other interesting materials into such magical works of art. She is involved in so many interesting textile swaps I can only dream about. I just marvel at her creative mind. Some of my favorite works of hers can be found here, here and here. But there is so much more, just explore all of her photos. We did a little trade and now I have my own piece of her work to marvel at. The Tree of Life.

Finally, my most recent addition to my vast collection arrived in the mail yesterday. I'm not sure if I can express with words how meaningful these cards are to me. They were given to me by Marianne as the sweetest gesture of "thanks" for being supportive of the creativity I see on her site. I love both of these ATCs. Both are beautiful collage works with original ink drawings. The Japanese girl doll is so sweet and the tree, well, you must know by now how much I love trees.

Thank you ALL so much for sharing your beautiful artwork with me. I treasure every one of these.

is never really a good idea. This seems to be my one opportunity though, so here I am. I came to beautiful San Fran last Thursday and have been buried in work these past five days. My, how I miss this community when I away from it. Lucky girl that I am though, I mentioned to a new buddy in craft blog land where I was traveling and she happens to live right here...not even too far from my hotel. Lucky me. Sonya and I got to meet yesterday. Lucky me. To spend an evening with this new friend, this creative soul who is every bit as charming, funny, beautiful and interesting as I had imagined her to be from reading her blog. Oh, but she says it all so much better here. Lucky me. She not only gave me the beautiful gift of her friendship, but she also brought me a present. Gorgeous vintage fruit buttons from Czechoslovakia.

There is nothing in the world like making this kind of connection. We both agreed that Mimi really says it best here when talking about how easy it is to meet fellow bloggers. It was wonderful to meet you!! Thank you for a great time Sonya!

In my down time from work, I like to work on projects up in my hotel room and managed to finish my ATCs for Amy's Valentine ATC Swap.

What fun I had playing with embroidery, felting, beading...I used remnants of old sweaters and leftover pieces of trim and lace, beads and silk ribbon. We are to trade in five and I made eight since I was having such a good time experimenting with different combinations.

There is another project keeping me busy. Hope to have something to show before too long. Good night.

One thing I cherish when working away from home is on my down time I can do things for myself I don't always have an opportunity to do while at home. For one, I actually started and finished a book! This book a gift from a friend of mine over a year ago and I finally had the opportunity to read it. It's a wonderful story about being a mom, I laughed and cried and completely related to the joys (and fears) of motherhood.

Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman.

This book is up for grabs. If you're interested in reading it, I will send this to the first person to comment saying they would like it.

I've also found a little time to make some ATCs. Anyone interested in a swap? These are felt and embroidered trees are up for trade. Just let me know if you're interested.

Congratulations to Jenna-you will get the book. And Jen-thanks for swapping ATCs.